Diggers You Bet Experience

As some of you may have seen, last weekend Dave Vickers, Neil Grainger and myself featured on the latest version of the TV challenge show You Bet, so here in this post, is some behind the scenes images and background story.

The long-established show has been re-branded as You Bet on Tour for this latest series, and has been filmed right across the country at various locations that will feature in the show over the coming weeks.

Of course, from my perspective, the show has always been a firm favourite for its digger challenges over the years, many of which we have featured on this blog before, so imagine my utter surprise when I was contacted by our good friend Dave Vickers, (Digging with Dave) to become part of his digger team for this latest show.

Dave had been approached by the You Bet production team thanks to his social media presence and also because he has his own diggers which would work perfectly for the show. He was asked to draft in another couple of operators one of which was another well-known digger related social media man Neil Grainger of (Always Digging) fame, and myself largely known for the Digger Man Blog online.

The whole thing took a lot of work behind the scenes as ITV need to know all about the individuals who are to appear on the TV, so there was lots of paperwork to deal with, but we sorted it all out,  and to cut a long story short we had a secret meeting in Staffordshire where we roughly came up with some ideas and did a dummy run of how it might go.

Having been accepted as challengers, the actual filming event came around pretty quickly and we arrived in Bournemouth around the 10^th June for filming the following day. On the actual day I think we were all pretty nervous, as there was a lot of pride at stake, and we all agreed we just had to win it at any cost!

The challenge itself was tricky, setting up the two deck chairs using just the diggers was the first hurdle, lets face it, those things can be tricky enough doing it just by hand! They then had to be placed on the mat in the right position, the picnic basket with food then had to be placed on the mat, ahead of the grand finale, the popping of the champagne cork, by Dave using his selector grab!

On the day it was an emotional experience, the like of which I haven’t experienced since my days of playing ice hockey, there is something about competing in a team event that is just like nothing else, the camaraderie between the three of us was just awesome, and I think we all complemented each other on the day, it was great to have so much experience beside us, and with Dave and Neil you couldn’t ask for much more.

A special mention must also go out to the TV production crew, who were all so lovely and totally professional and treated us so well throughout the whole experience. Additional mentions must go to Luke Beddows, Steve Biggs, Tyer Owens and Louise Damato, and of course the celebrities, Stephen Mulhern, Alesha Dixon, Josie Gibson and Josh Widdecombe.

On a personal level, I would like to thank Dave for asking me to be involved, and for having faith in me to get the job done, bearing in mind that I have not been operating full time for over a decade now, since my transition into the media side of things, so cheers mate!

Dave and Neil are two of the best guys you will ever meet, true industry professionals who have put in the hard miles in the seat, and had dirt, grease and diesel on their hands, you are a pair of legends and I salute you! 

Dave's trademark saying has always been, "Teamwork makes the Dreamwork" and that was without doubt the case for this challenge!

You can still see our You Bet on Tour episode  in its entirety on ITVX, but below you can find a clip of our piece of the action from Saturday’s show.